Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu is a big cheese at the UN climate meetings. He was the Democratic Republic of Congo’s lead negotiator at COP23 in Bonn. He is the chairman of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. He is the ex-chair of the Africa Group at the climate negotiations, and last year he was the chair of the least developed countries. He is on the board of the Green Climate Fund.

California’s governor, Jerry Brown, travelled to Bonn for COP23. On 11 November 2017, he launched “America’s Pledge”, a proposal for states, municipalities and businesses to meet the US commitments under the Paris Agreement. Brown’s presentation was interrupted by climate justice protesters, including indigenous people, chanting “Keep it in the ground”.

According to the UNFCCC’s provisional list of registered parties, just over 19,000 people travelled to Bonn for this year’s climate negotiations, COP23. While that’s a huge number of people, it’s only about half of the number that travelled to Paris for COP21. Ovais Sarmad, Deputy Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, says that 28,800 people took part over the two weeks of meetings in Bonn.

Earlier today, REDD-Monitor wrote a post about the Coalition for Rainforest Nations’ application to register “REDD+” as a trademark. The post ended with a series of questions for Kevin Conrad, the Executive Director of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations.

REDDisms:

“Instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion-dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that [Goldman Sachs] gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an ‘environmental plan,’ called cap-and-trade.”